Disability, Hate Crime and Violence

Alan Roulstone, Hannah Mason-Bish

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136249945
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Criminal Law
• Index: Law

This book provides a comprehensive and interdisciplinary examination of disability, hate crime and violence, exploring its emergence on the policy agenda. Engaging with the latest debates in criminology, disability and violence studies, it goes beyond conventional notions of hate crime to look at violences in their myriad forms as they are seen to impact upon disabled people's lives.

Despite a raft of relevant policy and legislation, few have attempted to draw together research on the disabled as victims of hate crime and violence. This innovative volume conceptualizes issues of disability, hate crime and violence and connects empirical research with theoretical insights. Making links between criminal justice policy, social care and welfare, it highlights areas of best practice and makes suggestions for policy and legislative reform. Disability, Hate Crime and Violence is written in accessible language, with minimal jargon and an international focus. Each chapter is grounded in research and practice, with relevant policy and legislation clearly signposted throughout.

Disability, Hate Crime and Violence provides a much needed theoretical and practical investigation of the key issues around disabled hate crime and violence. It is an important work for students and academics researching and studying in disability studies, criminology, social policy and sociology, as well as those with an interest in domestic violence studies and broader historical and philosophical constructions of disability, violence and social harms.

Part I

Conceptualising Disablist Hate Crime

1 Conceptual Issues in the Construction of Disability Hate Crime

Hannah Mason-Bish, University of Roehampton

Introduction

In September 2011 the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) launched the findings of a comprehensive inquiry into disability hate crime. This long-awaited report, Hidden in Plain Sight (EHRC, 2011), recommended inter alia that greater understanding of, monitoring of, support in reporting, and residential service protections in hate crime are urgently required. The report also suggested an urgent need to review the extent to which ‘special measures’ are being embedded in criminal justice process and greater clarity on lead agencies in a given authority. This research comes four years after Fiona Pilkington killed herself and her disabled daughter Francecca Hardwick after suffering relentless abuse which went on for seven years. Despite the prolonged nature of harassment and evidence of targeting based on disability, the police failed to take action to stop the abuse and bring about justice for the victims. Central to this poor response was the failure to correctly identify the incidents as forms of disability hate crime. Speaking at the time of the inquest into their deaths, Mencap Chief Executive Mark Goldring said:

This should be the watershed moment for disability hate crime, when the government and the police treat all disability hate crime as seriously as racist hate crime … How many more defenceless people must die for these incidents to be treated as a crime rather than anti-social behaviour?

(Mencap, 2009)

The Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) inquiry into the case found a national lack of awareness by the police in recognising disabled people as targets of hate crime and a lack of understanding of sentencing provisions and evidence gathering (IPCC, 2011). This chapter therefore provides a useful examination of the reasons behind the slow responses to disability hate crime, the implications of this, and looks for potential remedies in terms of policy and practice.

There is evidence of a long history of poor treatment of disabled people by the criminal justice system and research also shows high levels of victimisation and low levels of reporting of crime (Cunningham and Drury, 2002; Quarmby, 2011). In this context it should be no surprise that disability hate crime mirrors this experience. When my own study of disability hate crime began in 2004 it would be fair to say that implementation of disability hate crime policy was patchy. Although included in the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) manuals on hate crime in 2005, individual forces only had to collect data on it from 2008. The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) did not issue their first disability hate crime guidance until 2007, whilst between April 2007 and March 2009, they prosecuted 576 defendants for disability hate crime. This is low when compared with 42,500 defendants prosecuted for racially and religiously aggravated crime (CPS, 2009).¹ When examining the police response there were 1,402 recorded disability hate crimes in the year ending December 2009, compared to 4,805 for sexual orientation and 43,426 for race (ACPO, 2009). Third-sector studies have shown that disabled victims of hate crime typically do not report it to the police for a number of reasons (Mencap, 1999: ‘Living in Fear’). The EHRC reported that these include a lack of victim awareness of their rights, previous experiences of the police and fear of losing independence (EHRC, 2009: 73). Crucially, they found that disabled people would downplay the seriousness of the incidents against them and would not readily use the term hate crime to describe what had occurred. This means that the role of police in identifying disability hate crime is even more important if victims are to get adequate assistance and justice.

Hate Crime and Disability

This chapter is based upon the findings of qualitative research by the author (Mason-Bish, 2008) which involved interviewing campaign group activists, policymakers and criminal justice practitioners in an attempt to understand how hate crime policy in Britain has been developed. Fifty semi-structured interviews were carried out with a variety of ‘key informants’, ranging from activists to policymakers. These included leading policymakers, senior management and criminal justice officials and campaign group lobbyists.² The interviews focused on the strategies employed by activists in shaping policy on hate crime and the decisions made by policymakers about how policy would be formulated and implemented. The research revealed the way that the role of campaign groups has been critical in gaining legal recognition for hate crime victims. They have lobbied, gathered evidence and engaged with practitioners in the criminal justice system to try to create workable policy. Hate crime has been a useful banner under which to frame these efforts and to highlight the similarities between different forms of victimisation. This supports the suggestion that hate crime legislation represents a response to an identity-politics call for legal recognition of victimhood and an opportunity for government to appear ‘tough on crime’. As many academics have noted, being included in hate crime legislation was designed to send a positive message to specific victim groups (Iganski, 1999; Hall, 2005). For the police it was a useful way to engage communities and to win their ‘trust and confidence’ (ACPO, 2000: 18). Aside from this, the term ‘hate’ suggested a level of seriousness which should mean that criminal justice agencies address it with some urgency. Academic contributions to the hate crime debate have tended to focus upon the concept of hate crime and how it should be defined. There is some consensus that hate crimes rarely occur because the perpetrator ‘hates’ the victim (Mason, 2005 abc).

For some, membership of a minority or oppressed group is a key criterion. Leslie Wolfe and Lois Copeland suggested that it was:

Violence directed towards groups of people who generally are not valued by the majority of society, who suffer discrimination in other arenas and who do not have full access to remedy social, political and economic injustice.

(Wolfe and Copeland, 1991: 8)

Their definition of hate crime suggests that victims are already marginalised by society and face injustice on many fronts. Barbara Perry concurs, suggesting that hate crimes reinforce structural inequalities and remind the victimised group of their position in society:

[they] … re-create simultaneously the threatened (real or imagined) hegemony of the perpetrator’s group and the appropriate subordinate identity of the victim’s group. It is a means of marking both the Self and the Other in such a way as to re-establish their ‘proper’ relative positions, as given and reproduced by broader ideologies and patterns of social and political inequality.

(Perry, 2001: 10)

Key to Perry’s explanation is the focus on victim groups rather than individual victims, which can be seen in the legislative response to hate crimes. Most legal statutes on hate crime have a definition of, and are accompanied by, a list of protected ‘statuses’. In Britain these are race, religion, sexual orientation and disability, which represent groups with a shared history of oppression, statistical evidence of victimisation and a legacy of poor criminal justice responses. However, critics of hate crime legislation have warned against an identity politics which creates arbitrary divisions between groups and might be merely symbolic in nature (Jacobs and Potter, 1998; Fraser, 2003). Barbara Perry warns that the term ‘hate crime’ also ‘tends to individualize bigoted violence, as the outcome of deeply personal dislikes’ (Perry, 2004: 124). It suggests that the motivation for the offence is individual pathology and does not take into account the wider structural conditions that might be to blame for the behaviour of the offender. A further extension of this problem is in the way that hate crime conjures up images of violence committed by strangers. Kielinger and Stanko have used the term targeted violence because in their view:

The term hate crime places the responsibility for the violence on strangers and therefore on individuals rather than society as a whole, the term ‘targeted violence’ places the incident inside the social context within which it occurs … The term hate crime obscures the relational advantages or disadvantages that are ever present in society and which may underscore the motivation and the power of language and intimidation behind these incidents.

(Kielinger and Stanko, 2002: 5)

It will be suggested that these issues are particularly pertinent to disability hate crime, where incidents might be more likely to be perpetrated by known offenders in a variety of public and private arenas.

An examination of hate crime as an approach to disablist violence is worthwhile, first due to the relative youth of the concept of hate crime and its influence on criminal justice policy. It emerged in Britain in the 1990s as a way of responding to racist instances of violence and harassment which had been drawn into sharp focus with the failures of authorities to respond to the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence. Hate crime legislation soon expanded to include enhanced sentences for religiously aggravated crimes in 2001, and in 2003 the Criminal Justice Act included a statutory aggravation for crimes where the perpetrator demonstrated hostility based upon the victim’s perceived sexual orientation or disability (HM Government, 2003).³ Furthermore, while incitement legislation has been developed to cover racist, religious and homophobic hatred, there is no legal coverage of disablist incitement.⁴ Although the word ‘hate’ is absent from most legal definitions of hate crime, recently criminal justice agencies have adopted a shared definition:

Any criminal offence which is perceived by the victim or any other person, to be motivated by a hostility or prejudice based on a person’s disability or perceived disability.

Notable within this definition is that the perception of the victim or any other person is key in deciding whether or not a hate crime has occurred. Also key is the use of ‘hostility’, a rather wide term where the CPS provide this guidance:

consideration should be given to ordinary dictionary definitions, which include ill-will, ill-feeling, spite, contempt, prejudice, unfriendliness, antagonism, resentment, and dislike.

(CPS, 2010)

As this chapter progresses we will see the difficulties in creating an operational definition relating to disability hate crime.

A second justification for a focus on hate crime responses to disability-related violence is that it has been added to pre-existing legislation and policy previously applied to other victim groups. As Anne Novis notes in her chapter in this volume, when my research b...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction Disability, Hate Crime and Violence
• Part I Conceptualising Disablist Hate crime
• Part II Responses to Disablist Hate Crime
• Index